Last night, I drove home from school with my mind completely blown. I thought my life was going through transformations from our first session and over the next three months, but yesterday took things to a whole new level. Yesterday explained decades of this “feeling” I’ve had in me around people, situations, or just being in this life. Yesterday, I learned something that forever changed my perspective.

For years, I’ve been very in tune with the fact that I can pick up on other peoples emotions and really feel them. I’ve been able to tap into their emotions and really understand what they are feeling in the moment along with what I am feeling in the moment. But there was always this other set of inputs that I could never really grasp an understanding of. It’s like, there was something else in the room.

As I’ve gone throughout the years and years of this project, I’ve started to understand who I am deep down inside and what I stand for. Further, as I have stripped away the necessity for goals and seeking a “place where it all turns out” I’ve been able to understand who is Evan Sanders without goals and all of those things. I used to define myself by what I was doing or where I was headed instead of just being here as the person I am. I was unhappy with this place and thought that if I tried to escape to “that” place things would work out a whole lot better. So take all of that away and I received an entirely new level of depth and access to specific feelings. I was more in tune with myself and how I was feeling and really had the opportunity to feel what others were experiencing as well.

But still, that other thing in the room.

I didn’t realize…I could also pick up on how other people felt…as people down to their core – just as I have known about myself…in this world.

Click.

When this moment happened, so many things started flashing in front of my eyes. All of the times I have walked into someones space my happy enthusiastic self and felt this overwhelming energy from something…was their emotions and energies in the present moment, as well as who they felt they were deep down in this world. If this doesn’t make much sense, stay with me for a moment. You see, I know really deep down who I am and what really matters to me at a soul level…and yet how could I possibly feel these incredibly conflicting emotions that felt so impossibly foreign to me? I thought, or at least doubted for a little while, it was me being inauthentic or not really knowing what mattered to me…but I finally realized, it really wasn’t me at all. It was me picking up on them.

Baffling.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had these incredibly conflicting signals after having picked up on how they are feeling and how I am feeling. There were deeper forces at play, far far deeper forces at play. So I sat there having flashback after flashback of these situations and realized that all of those body sense feelings were trying to tell me something at a core level that I couldn’t actually pick up yet.

There are about a million other things I experienced, learned, etc. yesterday that made a substantial difference in the way I look at things, but that piece above there…that made some type of impact.

Doesn’t really stop there though. All those times that I walked into a place and felt this overwhelming energy and escaped from it…I have a different choice now. I know, within my abilities, that I have the chance to actually change that room. I have the ability to change the energy of that room in a few different ways and have simply never understood that was in my bag of capabilities in the past. But I do. I can fill up that room with something that is far less hostile or uncomfortable with something else entirely.

So, life just got a little bit more interesting…and a whole less hostile. That, is a gift from yesterday. A big gift.

Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project